In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.
And most of what was recorded is logistics and propaganda.
We got lucky there
We often only know the propaganda by the way it contradicts the logistics.
They’re crying because of the comma
I really want to know what that’s doing there. Like, what did they think that was supposed to do?
Dramatic pause maybe?
Commas don’t do that; that’s what em dash is for.
Anyone who has ever had to dig through an overly verbose log file is fine with this. 90% of what happens is tediously mundane.
sorry but so what. we dont need to know everthing
I used to say the same thing to my highschool history teacher. Little did I know, it would help me later on. I’m not talking about pointless dates - it’s the lessons that matter.
One can’t know everything, but knowing some of it enables us to prevent the mistakes that we would have made otherwise.
yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.
90% of the bullet points are unrecorded. If we’re counting every Joe Smoe, then 99.9999…% is unrecorded.
I would say considering homo sapiens have been around for ~250,000 years we need a lot of decimal places… if you want to consider prior homo species that’s 2.8 million years and honestly you might as well call it 100%.
Most of it was shit anyway and current history is shit too so it doesn’t matter.
Youre shit.
Cry some more
lovely stuff
Feels like we’re doing our best to make up for that now with pics and video from almost everyone on the planet hitting the interwebs.
I pity the historian that has to try to dig through all of it.
They won’t dig through it manually. They’ll have better bulk data processing than even the NSA has today.
That’s if it survives. Entropy has a go at everything.
Funny how some older media are so much better for longevity, like CDs.
And the expected lifespan is still only 50-100 years.
That’s a speck of sand it the human history.Tape disk drives and tapes are actually some of the longest lasting, when stored properly. Tape isn’t great for active data needs, where you need to read/write the data regularly. Super slow for that. But it’s killer for writing once and then dropping it in storage.
Anyway, same thing with tapes, the length of time they last is a fraction of history, on top of needing proprietary hardware to play them.
For example, there was that recently unearthed pilot of a sketch comedy show from Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’s Douglas Adams. It’s not particularly great, but it was lost to time except for a copy that Chapman had recorded to tape when the show first aired.
Problem was, that tape was so old when it was discovered, it pre-dated VHS and Betamax and was in a format that literally no players existed for anymore. This lead to a long effort to rebuild a player from scratch, which they eventually succeeded, and now it lives on YouTube for weird comedy nerd historians.
Anyway, the point being is that the mediums are short-term storage, for all intents and purposes, and that pretty much goes for all types of media humans uses, going as far back as stone tablets and books. The ones that survived were lucky and most are lost to time due to destruction or environmental degradation. At least with stone tablets and paper all you needed was to understand the language it was written in. Now we’re going to need electricity and knowledge of historical data storage practices and technologies.
So, we’re always losing history, and people who go out of their way to preserve history and put it in modern formats to attempt to keep the data from disappearing forever are doing a service to future human history. I would say, in this way, pirates who remove DRM from media are taking part in an act of historical preservation.
Yeah, I think as long as we can count on some level of society, we have a shot at longer term preservation. Like, computers will continue to get faster, and mediums will continue to get upgraded and transferred and so forth, and we’re kind of already at a point where nothing recorded today needs to be “lost” with some careful planning. There are obvious holes in this, but it’s increasingly less likely to be a problem that the storage medium is the issue (again, caveating that we’re not talking about rebuilding society after a catastrophe or something) and more a problem with what the dependency of reading the data to be saved is, whether it’s transferred on storage formats that maintain data integrity, etc.
Like, we can do redundant backups and so forth, but what if the things we’re backing up are server dependent? Or even simpler shit like Flash games. I really hope that more people writing software especially think about how to keep it usable for a long time.
That’s making some assumptions about what society looks like in the future. I’m guessing it’s more likely they’ll be looking over the device you used to type that message wondering what the hell it was used for.
Depends. In some ways you are correct but in other ways not so much. We like to think in the digital age once its up, its up forever. In theory yes but in some ways no since we have already seen in recent memory. Hell the popularity of lemmy and the fedeverse was kicked off because many of us left reddit, lead to many of us basically deleting/editing our prior comments. Someone can possibly have a snapshot of it but the chances of it are pretty small for some weird random obscure post on a forum. Our reliance on free services can easily lead to something disappearing as easily as it appeared. Hell we are seeing some youtube videos basically disappearing over fears of Ai scraping and it can happen abruptly.
Not only that; websites get deleted, servers can fail, data can be corrupted, business toss out memory storage when going out business, etc.
Nothing in the digital lasts.
This is why I’m really hoping that the idea of quantum archeology turns out to be more science than bullshit.
I’m not really sure what quantum archeology is, but another possibility is that, should we ever discover a way of circumventing the speed of light, you could fly millions of light-years away and set up a big-ass telescope to watch past earth. It’d only work if we discover a way of travelling ftl though, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll accomplish that in our lifetimes.
We could point our telescopes at black holes and look at our past light they fling back at us
Basically it’s this idea that you can date online the universe itself to restore anything or anyone from the past
There are so many crazy possibilities that will probably never happen, I love imagining what the world would be like if we could look through a time window - my daydream is normally about sending probes back to the point in space earth used to be and how fascinating the debates about where to look first would be, knowing it’s going to take years to get there and record it with everyone debating and getting anxious as to what it’ll see.
Like imagine how much information you’d get from fifteen minutes 4k footage of a Roman senate debate, and how disappointing it’d be after all that anticipation if you get a day or was closed. Still a billion things to obsess over in the image but disappointing when you’re hoping to see ceaser speak
Of course trying to catch sight of Jesus would be a huge project, I imagine it like those grifts where people go looking for the arc. What do they do if there’s no sign? What do they do if when they look nothing is anything like expected - would be so many people trying to find clues to what actually happened, at some point someone is going to find something really wild like they finally find someone from the Bible but it’s Jesus mate Judas laughing about how rich they’re getting pulling the reward money and rescue scam from the good the bad and the ugly…
And the people scouring to get clips for their YouTube channel, histories biggest cringe moments, wildest parties in history, luckiest trick shots ever…
Imagine setting up to see Calígula, and he talks just like Trump.
What I would find absolutely crazy is someone having no idea how this technology that we find ubiquitous, but the far future doesn’t have a clue about it, so someone gets out his Quantum Resurrection machine and brings back Grandpa to explain it
Want to feel sadder? Humanity has existed on Earth in its current form for about 200,000 years.
We’ve only had civilization for about 10,000.
That means humans spent about 180,000 years throwing rocks, sticks, and presumably feces at each other in the dirt before we entertained the idea of working together for mutual benefit. With all of our present senses and capacities at our disposal.
Just incase anyone ever wonders why it’s so difficult for humanity to do what’s best for itself. We only do what’s in our best interests after we’ve fully exhausted all the bad options several times over.
that’s not really true. 10,000 years ago is about when we developed agriculture, stopped roaming as much, and started writing in some form that could survive the millennia, but we’ve been living and working together since long before we were ever recognizably human.
Pre-agrarian humans had more in common with beasts than with us. We were basically just another migratory animal subject to the migration patterns of our prey and seasonal growth. We have had the misfortune to see what feral humans who survived in isolation behave like.
The larger scale cooperation required for agriculture is when we began to diminish behaving as such.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Sanichar
We are products of our environments.
This is the dumbest “im so smart and edgy” comment I’ve ever seen. what we call a feral human today haa zero relation to life in pre-agrarian societies, also the idea that people …going to places were food will be makes them mindless zombies is so ridiculous thatI don’t even know where to start
20 minutes of looking into archeological sites will show you how complex and cooperative non-agrarian society’s were (I’m saying non here instead of pre because there are many instances of societies developing agriculture and then moving away from it due to various social/environmental factors)
Yeah. People seem to forget that the people in our past are exactly the same as us. They had fun, loved each other, got upset, got happy, worked together. They just didn’t have the advancements we have. Just because they went where food was doesn’t make them any less human. What else were they gonna do? Starve? They needed to eat, and they didn’t know of any alternative reliable way of getting food besides hunting since they didn’t figure out farming yet.
. 10,000 years ago is about when we developed agriculture, stopped roaming as much, and started writing in some form that could survive the millennia
This is bias towards a specific type of societal structure.
Lots of peoples with rich, complex and fascinating cultures continued to live successful nomadic lives for centuries past the introduction of agriculture.
In addition, we keep pushing key invention dates back further and further as we discover more archaeological evidence. It’s quite possible we were doing human things long before we think we did.
This is another thing that seems really weird to me. The explosion of technological development in the last 300 years or so compared to the preceding several thousand is pretty wild.
What boiling water with coal does to a motherfucker.
One of my favorite memes in general, used to great effect here.
What ______________ does to a mf
But I mean… really tho!!
We never stopped throwing feces and I guarantee we were more close to each other in prehistory than we are now. We’ve been waging war for as long as we could record it.
That’s what the authorities want you to think. They don’t consider anything civilized unless it’s suffering under their rule.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilis#Latin
It literally just means “living in a city”
The first and longest lasting of all prisons.
Go live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, then. Stop wasting society’s resources.
I give more to society than you or the parasites you worship.
Probably more like 99,999…%
Is it history and not ancient times if it is not recorded?
I would like to add:
Imagine all of the recorded history that was destroyed.
I had a thought about this on a toke and walk. Imagine all the artisans over the course of human existence. All the skills and tricks they learned to just exist and live. Like a hunter tieing the ends of their bow in a slightly different way so it would work better with what they had, or a cook who figured out a more interesting way to make pasta or something. All that is just lost to the sands of time. That’s okay, humanity is struggling along just fine. Still left me wondering, what do we not know?
Well how far back are we talking? 200,000 years or just since writing was invented. Technically those cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago could be telling historic events of some kind but if we even just say “only since 5000BCE” and only consider events of significant historic consequence shaping any given region (as opposed to neighbors starting a blood fued by shitting in each others yurts), then it’s STILL probably like 90% lost which is just wild.
I’m glad we don’t know.
Life isn’t worth living just because it will be written down, so what if no one remembers, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
It might as well mean that. We’re all insignificant to the cosmos.
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it…[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us… The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians…the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians…the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us…as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)
Isn’t ancient Persian science pretty significant?
To my knowledge, most of it from antiquity was lost. Whish is what Ibn Khaldun was speaking about, not the scholarship for the Islamic period.
To clarify, I did mean the pre-Islamic Persians, but it looks like you’re right. There is evidence of engineering achievements but a lot was lost.
omg thank u comrade new book to search for: Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah
That’s OK. We’re only interested in white history.
Greeks, Romans, Vikings, tell me more.
Aboriginals and Aztecs? They’re just some guys squatting on that land we found.
The universe is too small to contain the jerk-off motion in my soul.
This is probably sarcasm (I hope) and people still downvoted you
Poe’s law.
Lemmy’s sarcasm detector is just as bad as Reddit’s.
I’m not very good at detecting it, but this is such a stupid and racist take that it must be sarcasm, right?
Whew, you might win the Olympic gold medal for mental gymnastics with that one.
